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by Sascha Corti.
Original Post: Working with High DPI Resolutions and Internet Explorer 6
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I really like working with high dpi resolutions. New laptops are all equipped with screens that can do very high resolutions but I always used to turn them down to XGA (1024*768 pixels) as text gets too small to read on a laptop screen at 1400*1050 or even 1600*1200 pixels.
My newest laptop however has VERY poor interpolation and any resolution below the maximum appears utterly blurry. So I started using higher dpi values (the default being 96) and found myself very comfortable working with 120 dpi. The benefit of this is that the whole UI gets scaled to 125%, which makes menus and non-scalable on-screen-text very readable again, still retaining the sharpness of the high resolution.
Another nice side-effect is that when I do a presentation on a projector at 1024*768 pixels, leaving my system at 120dpi, the whole Windows UI (including Visual Studio .NET that I usually present) remains scaled up, which greatly adds to the visibility of my demos for the audience.
Anyway. One problem was that Internet Explorer 6 did not scale up web sites at higher dpi rates. When I increased the text-size in IE, web sites would fall "out of proportion", as images stayed the same size. I now found the solution in a knowledge-base article (820286). The following registry-key:
tells Internet Explorer 6 to scale web sites in high-dpi configurations. The bad part: bitmap (= non-vector) -based images get jagged when scaled up. But I still like the result. The article btw. also states how to enable high dpi:
Right-click the Windows desktop, and then click Properties on the shortcut menu. The Display Properties dialog box opens.
Click the Settings tab, and then click the Advanced button.
On the General tab, DPI settings appear in a list in the Display area. To change the DPI setting, select a size from the DPI setting drop-down list under Display, and then click OK.
Restart your computer to allow the changes to take effect.